


My Red Dragon

by TheOtherMaddHatter



Category: Hannibal (TV), Red Dragon (2002), Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Before Red Dragon, Character Death, Eating Disorders, Gen, Post Events Of The Show, Someone Help Will Graham, Starvation, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Trigger Warnings, Triggers, Will Believes He Deserves To Die, Will Takes His Own Life, self-punishment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 11:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/939311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOtherMaddHatter/pseuds/TheOtherMaddHatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal revels in the pain that it will cause those around Will when he finally slips away, because he can see what Will cannot.  Will’s perception is too skewed by his low self-esteem and the accumulating horrors that his unstable mind has been forced to endure over the years, and that when mixed with his over-whelming guilt complex and need for penance, it gives Will a limited view of the world where he cannot see the hurt he will do to those around him.  Because Will believes he’s fixing his mistakes, he cannot see that he’s making even more.</p><p>Hannibal never tells.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Red Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> This little idea has been bouncing around with me for a while now, and I figured with my rare free-day that I'd write it down and put it out there to torment you all like it has been me. It's a little disjointed and different from my normal writing style, but was fun to try on for a bit to write this. Enjoy, or don't, because this will hurt, I promise. 
> 
> My AU!Beginnings for Red Dragon, where Will doesn't go on to help the FBI stop the Tooth Fairy killer, but instead tries to take his own pain and channel it into an apology for his short-comings. When it doesn't work as well as he's hoped it would, he escalates until he finally decides that the only way to really repent is to end his life like he'd unknowing helped to end. 
> 
> Over all, this entire story takes place a few months after Hannibal is fully sentences and Will fully recovers from his injuries. Starvation can take a while, and those suffering from prolonged bodily neglect usually die from heart problems or organ failure due to complications. With Will, you can take your pick.

Nothing really important happens immediately after Hannibal Lecter is captured.  Or, at least, nothing important happens to Will Graham, who is still laid up in the hospital recovering from his multiple stab wounds courtesy of Dr. Lecter himself.  The tale of their struggle makes it rounds without him conscious and present for it.  He’s unconscious for most of the time spent there -long enough for Freddie Lounds to sneak in past his armed guard to take multiple photos of the horror his body has become- and when he’s not unconscious, he’s drugged to the gills.  He doesn’t remember most of it.  He’s thankful for that.  

 

No, everything that happens to Will, happens after he wakes up for real.  He finds out for sure that his assumptions about Hannibal being the Chesapeake Ripper are right.  That Hannibal had been _eating_ the victims and the pieces they hadn’t found... his trophies.  But not only that.  Never _only that_.  Worse still is that Hannibal, on top of eating his trophies, has also been serving them to others as well.  His dinner guests in particular, all those fancy dinner parties of his coinciding with the multiple murders, one right after another, each new victim missing a tasty piece of themselves.  When this comes out, some of his socialite friends collapse, some vomit, some look so pale that Will is afraid they’re dead inside already, much like him.  Their murders are just more lives he can attribute to the raging storm that is Hannibal Lecter.  

 

It only gets worse from there.  

 

Will feels like he’s at the edge of something enormous, right at the very tipping point.  There’s a very long way to the bottom if he falls.  And even he knows that he’s far too unstable to survive a fall of that magnitude.  But the fall finds him none-the-less.  Because, not only had Hannibal been serving these... _dishes_ to his high society acquaintances, but also to certain members of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.  He’d been feeding them to all of them, every time he cooked, every time he served up something, made something, in his Hellish kitchen made of nightmares and stainless steel.  Manipulating and torturing while they laid themselves at his feet.  Only Lecter knows for sure just how much human meat he served to Jack Crawford and his wife, to the others, but Will?  Will now knows _exactly_ how much Hannibal fed to him.  He was just too stupid to see it while it was happening, but now his perspective is different.  Now he’s unmasked and un-blinded by their fast-budding friendship and the offered stability he had so desperately wanted. 

 

When finally he realizes that he’s fallen off the edge, it’s far too late for anyone to help him, least of all himself.  In the beginning, it’s horrifyingly painful for him.  Mental and physical, and the pain persists, sharp and agonizing and all-consuming.  Will can’t seem to crawl away from it fast enough.  It hurts in his very bones, in the pulsing of the scar tissue where Hannibal had tried to gut him in his sitting room.  After Will had come to him for help.  _Like slipping into a warm bath_ , Hannibal had said, whispering it into his ear as he could feel the blood pooling out, down his legs, onto the polished floor.  It seeps into his socks, because of course he’s removed his shoes in Hannibal’s home.  It was only polite!  But nothing feels like that now.  Now, it all hurts.  

 

Each time Will wakes up, he can feel it, and pretty soon, Will can feel it every time he moves or breathes or blinks.  Every time he even thinks about putting something into his mouth to eat.  So Will just stops.  Maybe it’s his crushing, crippling sense of guilt compounded by his inability to cope with what Hannibal has done to him, or maybe it’s his own inability to forgive himself for not seeing the monster Hannibal had been all along.  It doesn’t matter, because the results are the same.  Will can’t trust anything anymore, not anyone or anything.  Not even himself.  _Especially_ not himself.  This isn’t the first time he’s betrayed himself like this, by his oh-so-sharp mind, but those few times before never seemed as horrible, never as dark as this time is.  He’s done betraying himself and everyone around him.  

 

It’s better like this, if Will just... _slips away_.  He stops eating.  

 

He’s quiet about it, of course, and plays it off in a friendly manner or a poorly-timed joke whenever he can.  Hides it as best as he can in front of the others when they turn their eyes towards him critically, but he knows what he’s doing to himself.  After a while, they stop asking, and Will stops hoping someone will see what harm he’s letting fall through his own fingers.  Will doesn’t want to stop it now.  It is his punishment for all his numerous crimes.  Rejecting food, rejecting to be fed, is his sentence.  It’s going to slowly kill him alongside the horrors of his work.  He likes it like that.  If anyone out there deserves to die, above all others, it’s him.  He needs to perish in this horrible way in a form of atonement.  It’s the only way he knows how.  Every other way is tainted by crime scene after crime scene, and every time he forces himself to look, it’s just another way out robbed from him.  Taken out from under his hands by someone else, by someone else.  There’s always so much blood.  He makes himself keep looking.  

 

What he’s doing, it’s not enough.  It’s happening too quickly.  He hasn’t suffered as much as he needs to, not if he wants to make up for all of his vast transgressions.  Not enough time has passed.  Will has to prolong it, prolong his suffering, and so for the first time in two weeks, he allows himself a few nibbles of stale bread and one glass of water.  It’s all he will give himself, and even that is too much.  The food is hard to keep down, the water even more so, but he keeps repeating his ingestion until his body no longer rebels, no longer vomits it back up.  Until it stays down, and then he continues on.  Will only barely eats enough to keep him alive longer, and infrequently, to keep him from dying as quick as normal periods of starvation would allot.  He makes sure of it.  

 

Food is now an object of his repentance, a means to his ultimate end.  He does not enjoy food anymore, doesn’t allow himself too.  That’s a step too far.  And, after all, he has to think of all those poor souls he’d allowed Hannibal to kill, to eat, to feed others, and how they’ll never eat again.  No, he doesn’t allow himself to enjoy what little he feeds himself.  He makes it hurt.  It’s how it should be.  He makes it hurt.  

 

He’s decided to retake his own life, even if he takes it permanently in the process.  It’s his to do with as he pleases, and this is how he wants it to be.  How he wants to go.

 

Will knows he’s loosing weight faster then he can hide it at this point, but no one ever says anything to him.  He catches Beverly looking at him strangely once or twice down in the pathology labs, but she never says anything, and if she tells Jack, he doesn’t bring it up.  It’s only work with him, right up until Will is no longer deemed stable enough to continue that anymore.  The FBI doesn’t think he can handle looking for them any longer.  They take away the work as a tool he uses to repent, so Will is forced to take away what little he eats in turn.  To keep it balanced.  He cleans out his kitchen and tears down his life.  There’s not much left to it anyways, Hannibal had made sure of that.  

 

It won’t be long now.  

 

He continues to visit Hannibal weekly though, in his new cell at the Baltimore State Hospital.  Will forces himself to enter his own personal Hell once every week as another method of self-punishment.  He greets Dr. Chilton, who has healed up nicely in the wake of Gideon’s gore surgery, and allows the man to poke and prod at him until he is content, allowed entry.  Then he takes himself down, down, down into the basement where they hold Hannibal the Cannibal, and sits before him.  Lays himself open for his one-time friend’s perusal.  Will never talks when he visits Hannibal, and instead he sits before him in his cell and stares everywhere but into Hannibal’s eyes.  He’s silent, and Hannibal mostly is too, except for when he’s feeling particularly vicious.  Then he plays upon their old friendship and therapy dynamic, just to get at Will, just to hurt and tear even more than he already has.  Will allows it, and it is in one of these many moments that Hannibal realizes that Will is doing to himself.  Hannibal revels in it, revels in the secrecy and the horror that it evokes, both in himself, as well as in Will.  

 

He revels in the pain that it will cause those around Will when he finally slips away, because he can see what Will cannot.  Will’s perception is too skewed by his low self-esteem and the accumulating horrors that his unstable mind has been forced to endure over the years, and that when mixed with his over-whelming guilt complex and need for penance, it gives Will a limited view of the world where he cannot see the hurt he will do to those around him.  Because he believes he’s fixing his mistakes, he cannot see that he’s making even more.  Hannibal never tells Jack, or anyone for that matter, even though the visits to him are few and far between.  Jack Crawford has only visited three times since his trial and sentence, and Hannibal knows that Jack knows Will visits every week.  He never mentions it, either to Will or to Hannibal, or even Hannibal’s once-colleague, Alana Bloom.  Hannibal knows Jack doesn’t see Will’s plan to kill himself.  

 

Alana only every visits him twice.  Once at the very beginning, when he’d woken up in the hospital after his altercation with Will in his home, and once before the last court hearing and his sentencing.  Both times she was in tears, and had nothing but accusations for him both times.  He doesn’t mind.  Will’s pain has been enough for him to keep going, but even that is drawing to a close.  Will’s time on this Earth is quickly ending.  Hannibal fears what it’ll be like without him.

 

So when Will comes around for the last time, looking mere inches from his ultimate end, Hannibal allows himself to slip up, and tell him goodbye and good luck.  He regrets it instantly after he’s said it, a crack in his cool mask, but it makes Will smile ruefully, almost sourly, before he nods once and stands.  It’s all they will say to one another before the end, and Hannibal knows it, but doesn’t say anymore.  Will doesn’t say a word as he walks the length of the hallway back to the stairs, and neither does Hannibal.  Will leaves that day and never comes back.  Hannibal is almost sad, in his own way, that Will is gone. 

 

It’s almost a full week and a half, nearly two, before Jack comes to visit him again, his face drawn and ragged and strained in a way that Hannibal hasn’t seen since the hospital.  Since Will had shot him, and he’d stabbed Will, tried to end his life himself.  But Will’s life hadn’t been Hannibal’s to take.  Will had proved that, and Jack Crawford is a testament to his success.  He knows immediately that Will has finally succumbed to his sickness and perished, most likely alone, just by how Jack looks.  It was the only way Will would ever let himself be taken, after Hannibal.  On his own terms.  At his own hands.   

 

Jack begins to tell him the news, and instantly Hannibal feels the full emotions behind the words that Jack doesn’t speak.  That the only reason Jack had even known to check in on Will had been because he’d wanted the former agent to consult on a new and horrific case, one involving the bloody slaughter of the Jacobi Family in their house.  Jack never called him for anything else, ever.  When Will doesn’t answer any of his calls, or anyone’s call for that matter, for nearly three days, Jack finally breaks down and decides to drive all the way out to Wolf Trap to check in on him.  He’d put off driving out there for another full day before he’d finally gone alone and angry.  

 

He had found the house empty and silent, the back door standing wide open, some snow drifting from the porch into the house itself.  No dogs, no Will, not until Jack had gone out into the field behind the house’s property and discovered Will’s lifeless body.  Will was crumpled in the tall grass about fifty yards from his porch, clad only in a mud-splattered, thread-bare t-shirt that hung from his overly bony frame, and a pair of ripped draw-string pants that were bunched as much as they could be across his protruding hip bones.  He wasn’t wearing a coat, or shoes, or even any socks, and his feet and hands were muddy, like his belly, as if he’d drug himself across the ground for more than a few yards.  It’d been cold all week, since the Sunday before, and there wouldn’t have been any mud since a few days before then, even in Virginia.  It is then that Jack realizes that Will has lain out here all by himself in the elements for more than a week.  That someone, anyone, could have saved him if they’d come to check up on him, if they’d cared enough to ask after him.  They hadn’t. It’s torture for Jack, Hannibal can see.  

 

Instead, Will had been out there dying with his glasses missing, covered in a layer of frost and light snow, and not much else.  His eyes are wide and starring endlessly up at the clear, clear sky above him, his fingers of one hand outstretched and reaching, like he’d wanted something, anything, before he’d died.  He’d never reached it.  They never find his phone.  They do find a half-feral dog pack curled at various stages of protection around him, Winston tucked dangerously at his side, teeth bared in a show of anger.  The multitude of hairs on his body all belong to the dogs at least twice over, like they’d taken turns laying with him in their wait.  Behind Winston, the other dogs can be seen circling the area, agitation evident in every movement they make, and their growls all very audible.  No one dares approach until Animal Services arrives and takes them away.  The dogs are mourning, and have been for most of the week in the lonely cold of Wolf Trap without human interference.  

 

Once the body is gone and everyone has cleared out from the property, Jack takes it upon himself to inform everyone who needs to know of Will’s death.  Katz, Price, and Zeller are already on scene to help with the initial forensics, just incase of foul play, but it is soon evident what has happened to Will.  Despite there being no note left behind, they all know Will has ended his own life for whatever reason.

 

Their pain-staking trek through Will’s home and possessions makes it evident what has happened to him in the end though, and the horrors they find along the way are only trumped by those lurking in the kitchen.  Beverly is the one to find the space barren except for the carefully arranged dog food along the counter top, the wet and dry sorted neatly beside one another.  There are bowls next to it, enough for two per dog: a water and food bowl.  There are no other dishes anywhere in the kitchen or in the house.  Not in the sink, not in the cupboards, not in the pantry, and not on the rickety table in the living room.  There is no utensils.  There are no operational appliances.  There is no food.  

 

The fridge has been unplugged for what appears to be a very long time, and the stove and oven combo are missing chunks of electronic components that are essential to their proper function.  These pieces are no where to be found in the house or on the property, and neither is the microwave that Jack knew Will kept on the counter beside the sink.  The sink itself is bone dry and dusty, and only gives off a trickle when the tap is turned on.  The water is hardly working in the entire house, caused by Will’s manual shut off of the well outside.  There is still no food.  And there is no garbage to suggest there ever has been any food.  Just the dogs meals lined up perfectly in their shiny tins and bags together, measured out perfectly and painstakingly by Will’s own hand.  

 

Beverly feels herself choke on the bile and food she’d eaten en-route to the scene, and she makes a made dash from the room and the house as every part of her rebels this new information.  That Will had done this to himself.  Had taken such great measures to make sure this was how it ended for him.  It takes both Price and Zeller to coax her back into a car so that they can take her Baltimore to be checked out after she continues to dry heave into the bushes and grass out front.  They are both pale faced and clearly shaken, almost as silent as Wolf Trap itself.  They don’t come back.  

 

Jack takes it upon himself to tell certain individuals in person of Will’s demise, least of all Hannibal, who is only allowed one hour of phone time a week, and only then with his attorney.  Jack _had_ to come in person to inform him.  It looks like it’s killing him.  Hannibal vindictively hopes it does.  

 

After Will’s funeral, Jack visits for the final time, and only briefly.  Less of a visit and more of a formal obligation, really, but Hannibal allows it to count.  He never has visitors, after all.  It’s long after Will’s house has been taken apart and thoroughly catalogued now, each piece of relevant data written down or noted somewhere in the man’s vast file.  Some of his personal things like his notes and case files are donated to Jack’s museum installation to be put on display with a plaque to remember him by.  Hannibal hardly thinks that does the man any justice when Jack tells him, but he doesn’t let it show.  Jack goes on to say that the rest of Will’s things are being donated to Good Will or the local ASPCA shelter.  There isn’t much left of Will Graham’s life anymore, except the envelope Jack finally hands over to him with a few final words and a growl.  The dingy, slightly bent-up envelope has his name written upon the front in Will’s cramped handwriting, a few grey stains here and there.  Inside, Hannibal finds the final words bestowed upon him by Will, the shaking scrawl all that’s left of the once-great man.  

 

**_Gone to visit Abigail.  Forgive my rudeness._**  


End file.
